Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.

Conservatives for Barack Obama are a stampede of ideology-free lemmings

Recently a fashion craze – or, more accurately, an epidemic – has broken out of British conservatives declaring themselves supporters of Barack Obama. Boris Johnson came out yesterday as pro-Obama, on the grounds that the Democrat candidate is talented, passionate, stands for hope – and is black.

British Conservatives are pinning their hopes on the wrong candidate

Well, slap my face and call me Bambi! One would hope that any politician who had reached the stage of being a presidential candidate would possess a modicum of talent – George W Bush being the exception that proves the rule. Passionate? That is a meaningless qualification: Hitler was passionate. And Obama talks about hope? Talk is cheap and it is unusual for politicians to campaign on a platform of despair. As for Boris's trump card – that Obama is black – how would he react to McCain supporters declaring for their man on the grounds he is white?

This fashion statement by a bunch of British Tories will not help Barack Obama: in the unlikely event that anybody in America notices, it will simply confirm Obama as the foreigners' choice for the Oval Office. On the other hand, it is extremely damaging to the soi-disant Tories who are uttering the kind of drivel Boris delivered yesterday. It betrays that contemporary British Conservatism has no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no agenda.

What are we to think of people who call themselves conservatives, but want to see the most powerful country in the world governed by the most extreme-left politician to operate there since the inception of the United States in 1776? How seriously can we take their professed hostility to big-government, free-spending, welfare-dependent, high-tax policies in Britain, when they want to impose all these ills on America?

This deranged behaviour by British Conservatives tells us a lot about them. They are bereft of an ideology, prone to make policy on the hoof. At the recent Tory Party conference David Cameron made an impressive effort to define and update a coherent Conservative philosophy. Yet he is wasting his time if his supporters are still living in the Blair era, treating politics as a branch of show business, ready to be seduced by a sharp suit, a polished media personality and a clutch of intrinsically meaningless soundbites.

Even Daniel Hannan, normally a beacon of informed common sense, has applauded this stampede of Conservatives to Obama: "Now, the grasslands are thrumming with the hooves of a mighty herd of Tory wildebeest"… Adjust your binoculars, Daniel. Those are not wildebeest, but lemmings. Show lemmings a cliff-edge and they will do what comes naturally. Nor are they Tories, or they could not support an extreme socialist. We are watching our rudderless Conservative wannabe rulers and we are not impressed.